Notable in Joseph’s narration was the admiration and appreciation he maintained for his AFDL commander. In contrast to the dominant international narratives about nefarious commanders who violently manipulated the children under their command, Joseph portrayed his commander as his protector and carer and the man who had saved his life.
Four years later, Joseph experienced what he described as the greatest loss of his life, one that led him to decisive action in a landscape of severely limited choices: “One day I was given some days of leave to visit home. Once there I went to visit my grandfather in the nearby village. When I returned home late that day, I found that the RCD had surrounded my house. They were accusing people of being Mayi-Mayi sympathizers. I saw my father as he was being beaten by the soldiers. He was beaten to death. To take vengeance for my father’s death, I decided to leave the RCD and to join the Mayi-Mayi.” By 2002, at thirteen years of age and having already served on the front lines of active conflict for almost seven years, Joseph was separated from the Mayi-Mayi group as it entered a demilitarization process negotiated during one of the peace accords—one of a series of DDR processes that would be repeated in various iterations over the following decade. He would benefit from the children’s DDR program, which included psychosocial support and education programming that aimed to assist his reintegration into civilian life.
Unfortunately, the war in the Kivus continued, and by 2004 Joseph was again left with few alternatives but to join another Mayi-Mayi group. During the infamous battle for Bukavu in May 2004, Joseph found himself once more on the front lines battling the RCD. Yet, rather than remembering this gruesome operation with anguish, Joseph recounted his involvement in this particular battle with pride: “I participated in the war in 2004 when the RCD attacked Bukavu. We managed to chase them back into Rwanda.” Most crucially for Joseph, by playing a part in the victory against the RCD forces, he had been able to avenge the death of his father. This knowledge helped him to deal with what he considered to be his life’s greatest loss and allowed him to maintain a sense of self-worth in subsequent years.
When I first met Joseph in 2010, he was twenty-one years old. He was struggling to earn the money he needed to survive each day. Although he had again been enrolled in a children’s DDR program after the 2004 conflict and had once more received “reintegration” training to become a mechanic, he could not find a job. Instead, Joseph was subsisting through daily wage labor, transporting heavy loads from the port up the long climb into town. It was grueling work that might earn him the equivalent of one US dollar per day. As I came to know Joseph better, I would learn that it was not his history as a “former child soldier” that distressed him but his inability to effectively surmount the challenges of daily survival.
Without the capacity to meet his basic needs, Joseph had stopped thinking about any kind of prospect for a more positive future. What surprised me about this was that Joseph had been a full “beneficiary” of two phases of children’s DDR programs, yet neither of these programs had made any significant difference in his life in the longer term. While in the first instance, in 2002, it was clear that “reintegration” could not happen due to the persisting conflict, the failure of Joseph’s second passage through the children’s DDR process required deeper investigation.
When Joseph had entered the second DDR program in 2008, a robust international normative framework had been firmly established to protect children from recruitment into and use by armed groups. As defined by the 2007 Paris Principles—or the Principles and Guidelines on Children Associated with Armed Forces and Armed Groups—a “child soldier” was any person younger than eighteen years of age and included “children, boys and girls, used as fighters, cooks, porters, messengers, spies or for sexual purposes. It does not only refer to a child who is taking or has taken a direct part in hostilities.”5 International law had criminalized the recruitment and use of children, and the Rome Statute that established the International Criminal Court listed it as a war crime: “Conscripting or enlisting children under the age of fifteen years into the national armed forces or using them to participate actively in hostilities.”6
Children’s rights to full DDR support had thus been enshrined in internationally accepted principles, and a generic approach to children’s DDR had emerged. At that time, the process was generally organized in three key phases. First, for disarmament, children would be identified among an armed group, usually through monitoring reports by UN observers, NGOs, and other local actors. Child protection actors would usually then engage in advocacy with the armed group commanders to ensure that any children under their command would be released. Once separated, children would be taken to transit care centers to begin the second stage of the process—“demobilization”—which was a transitional period that might last several weeks or many months and usually involved social, psychosocial, educational, and recreational activities conceived to support children’s eventual readaptation to civilian life. Once “demobilized,” children would be given certificates confirming their status and then returned home, thus beginning the third and last phase of the DDR process: “reintegration.” Children would be enrolled in one of a selection of reintegration programs that might include schooling, vocational training, or an income-generating activity.
Over the years of my work in conflict-affected contexts, I repeatedly witnessed the weak conception and poor implementation of children’s reintegration programs. The Paris Principles define reintegration as “the process through which children transition into civil society and enter meaningful roles and identities as civilians who are accepted by their families and communities in a context of local and national reconciliation.”7 In practice, the programming support provided to children was consistently unable to meet their reintegration needs.
Such failures were clearly and simply articulated in the narrative of Christian, another young man I worked with closely during my doctoral research. He described how the support he had received from a child protection NGO had done nothing to help him meet his everyday survival needs. He had gone through the children’s DDR process in 2006 and enrolled in a skills training program that was designed to help him earn a viable livelihood and return to civilian life. When I met Christian in 2010, he was twenty years old and struggling to survive each day. As he explained:
Before the war, I was a student. I had to stop studying in 2002, after my third year of school. We didn’t have any money, and I was responsible for taking care of my brothers. When the war came here, we were displaced to Walungu, where eventually I was taken by the [militia]. I stayed with them until 2006. There was so much suffering in those years, but I was quiet because that’s life. Once I got out, I went to [the local child protection NGO] for demobilization and reintegration. They gave me training and they promised me a job. But they lied—I never got a job. I got my [demobilization] certificate, but what good is a piece of paper? I dreamed that at this age I would be doing something different, that I would be able to care for my brothers, but I can’t. My parents left during the war. After my father was chased away from our land in Mushinga, he went to Maniema to look for gold, and we haven’t heard from him since. My mother is a merchant in the gold mines in Mushinga. She prays for me every day that I may find a job. A job is the most important thing for me.8
According to both this young man and Joseph, the clearly elaborated children’s DDR framework, and in particular its reintegration aspects, had done little to help them “enter meaningful roles and identities as civilians,” despite the DDR program’s aspirations. More disconcertingly, several other young people described their situation after having gone through the children’s DDR process as more precarious than before. This was especially the case for a group of young women who had been separated from the Forces Armées de la République Démocratique du Congo (FARDC). One young mother who had served with the national army for five